Marble Sky stands as a strikingly wrought meditation on sadness, love and the depths of memory. Witscher’s musical sensibilities are diverse (cf. Rene Hell), but what is evident here as elsewhere is a feel for feeling articulated through texture and architecture.
Jeff Witscher issued some of the most memorable and enduring music of a protean musical trajectory as Marble Sky. Released as short-run cassettes in the late ’00s, it was imbued with an eerie romanticism whose hermetic nature was further compounded by mysterious artwork (see here and here). Tape-mediated ambient drone (before tropes fossilized into Ambient Drone™) which, from the vantage point of today, are emblematic of a uniquely tender movement in American experimental music, documented largely by West Coast tape labels like Ekhein, Monorail Trespassing, and Witscher’s own Callow God. Students of Decay, once a cottage industry imprint itself, compiles tracks from debut The Sad Return (2007) and its follow-up Low God (2008) for a special double-LP re-issue, Marble Sky.
“Pulling up Grass Under a Blanket” opens the set, reflecting The Sad Return’s dedication to ‘several friends passing through and across’ in an outpouring of harmonic drone too maximal to be Ambient™, smears of tone wrung from guitar seep into a warm washed-out synth ooze, evolving with a tide of white noise coming in, with vague, hazy turns, growing in textural and emotional heft across its span, clarion blasts eventually calling/crawling out of the fug. A long wistful stare towards a grey horizon rather than a big boo-hoo, a symbolic struggle for full voice through a hiss haze threatening to efface. “Dull Hue” arcs out with a stronger voice, a miasma of guitar drones striated with background fuzz, brighter notes piercing the eponymous marble. “What You Might Forget” continues romancing the drone, again scoured by obfuscating static, eventually softer drone lines rising above, seguing into violin-esque oscillations in an emotional narrative of flux and mutability. From Low God/Lady, “A Shining Juniper” is initially sullen with inky gruzz, which quickly falls away to afford perhaps the set’s most winsome track, unfurling in an airy haze of distant glow with flutters of sharper shinier synth late in the day. “Sunset on Low” offers a minimal interlude, languishing in a bleary, dim shifting haze before culmination in “Lea; Crossed Eyes,” bathed in a thin shimmering light, slowly building mile-high skyward to a steepling tonal monolith of cathartic force. Throughout Witscher channels devotional dreamstates that somehow succeed in adumbrating the glacial synth studies of Elaine Radigue and Steve Roach’s analog space music through early-mid SotL’s lowlight symphonics with distant nods to Tim Hecker harmonized noise, and more recently Matthew Sullivan’s kindred spirited Earn.
Ultimately, Marble Sky stands as a strikingly wrought meditation on sadness, love and the depths of memory. Witscher’s musical sensibilities are diverse (cf. Rene Hell), but what is evident here as elsewhere is a feel for feeling articulated through texture and architecture. Remastered by James Plotkin and pressed into a deluxe 2LP edition with photography by Helen Scarsdale and gatefold tip-on jacket, it’s a chance to grab material as painfully short in circulation as it was sorely neglected at the time of original release.
Marble Sky is available on Students of Decay.
